# Witscript 2: A System for Generating Improvised Jokes Without Wordplay

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03036 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03036/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [Let's be Humorous: Knowledge Enhanced Humor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13317/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Humor Mechanics: Advancing Humor Generation with Multistep Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07280/) (2024)
- [Understanding Literary Texts by LLMs: A Case Study of Ancient Chinese Poetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00060/) (2024)
- [Designing and Evaluating Dialogue LLMs for Co-Creative Improvised Theatre](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07111/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A previous paper presented Witscript, a system for generating conversational jokes that rely on wordplay. This paper extends that work by presenting Witscript 2, which uses a large language model to generate conversational jokes that rely on common sense instead of wordplay. Like Witscript, Witscript 2 is based on joke-writing algorithms created by an expert comedy writer. Human evaluators judged Witscript 2's responses to input sentences to be jokes 46% of the time, compared to 70% of the time for human-written responses. This is evidence that Witscript 2 represents another step toward giving a chatbot a humanlike sense of humor.